The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  The situation in the Kyiv metropolitanate did not differ much from the situation that had prevailed before the Reformation and the start of Catholic reform in other parts of Europe. In many ways, it was business as usual, but parts of the Orthodox elite began to perceive it as a crisis. The Catholic Church in the commonwealth was busy reinventing itself with the help of Jesuit schools and colleges, posing an implicit challenge to unreformed Orthodoxy. The publishing and educational activities of the circle around Prince Kostiantyn Ostrozky were an initial response to that challenge. No less concerned about the state of church affairs were the members of Orthodox brotherhoods—organizations of Rus’ merchants and tradesmen in major Ukrainian cities. The members of the Lviv brotherhood, the richest and most influential of them all, challenged the authority of the local Orthodox bishop, whom they believed to be corrupt and thus a liability in their dealings with the dominant Catholics. In 1586 the Lviv burghers succeeded in establishing their independence of the bishop, and in 1591 they opened their own school without waiting for him to do so.

  The Orthodox hierarchs found themselves in an impossible position. Their status in the Catholic-ruled commonwealth was secondary to that of the Catholic bishops, who were members of the senate and had direct access to the king. (Ostrozky and other princes and nobles felt that they were the true masters of the church.) The brotherhoods were in open revolt, undermining the bishop’s monopoly on teaching church dogma, and the patriarch of Constantinople, instead of helping the bishops, took the rebels under his protection (they knew how to appeal to the cash-strapped hierarch). A solution to this conundrum suddenly presented itself in the idea of union with Rome. The vision of church union shared by the Orthodox hierarchs rested on a model proposed by the joint Catholic-Orthodox Council of Florence in 1439. In the twilight years of the Byzantine Empire, both the emperor and the patriarch grew desperate to save it from Ottoman attacks. A promise of assistance came from Rome, at the price of uniting the two churches under papal authority. The Byzantine leaders agreed to that condition, which subordinated their church to Rome and replaced Orthodox dogmas with Catholic ones. In particular, they agreed with the Catholics on the all-important issue of the filioque, admission that the Holy Spirit proceeded not only from God the Father but also from God the Son, Jesus Christ. They managed, however, to maintain the institution of the married priesthood, the Greek language, and the Byzantine liturgy.

  In the summer of 1595, two Orthodox bishops set off on the long journey to Rome, bringing along a letter from their fellow Orthodox hierarchs asking the pope to accept them into the Catholic Church on conditions close to those of the Union of Florence. In Rome, Pope Clement VIII received the travelers and welcomed the “return” of the bishops and their church at a ceremony in the Hall of Constantine in the Vatican. The bishops, armed with a papal bull and numerous breves to the king and other commonwealth officials, returned home to convene a church council that would declare the conclusion of the union and announce the transfer of the Kyiv metropolitanate to the jurisdiction of Rome. The king gladly arranged the time and location of the council: it was to take place in October 1596 in the town of Brest on the Polish-Ukrainian-Belarusian border.

  It seemed for a while that it was a done deal—the pope, the king, and the bishops all wanted the union. The problem was with the faithful or, more precisely, with the major stakeholders in the church. These included Prince Ostrozky and his fellow Orthodox magnates, members of the brotherhoods, and the monastic and a good part of the parish clergy. The magnates did not want to lose control of the church—in the age of the Reformation, it was a valuable political and religious asset not to be taken lightly; the brotherhoods wanted reform from below, not greater power for the bishops; some of the archimandrites, who ran the monasteries without taking monastic vows, wanted to continue managing church landholdings; and some of the monks, clergy, and rank-and-file faithful could not imagine betraying the holy Orthodox Church by abandoning the patriarch of Constantinople. It was a haphazard but powerful coalition of reformers and conservatives, true believers and opportunists that placed the plans of Rome, Warsaw, and the Orthodox hierarchs in jeopardy.

  Prince Kostiantyn Ostrozky, arguably the most powerful man in Ukraine, was determined to prevent the church union. In the form suggested by the bishops, it threatened to wrest the church from his control and limit his ability to use Orthodoxy as a weapon in the struggle with royal power to keep a special place for the Ruthenian princes in commonwealth society. He must also have felt personally betrayed. One of the two bishops who had gone to Rome asking for the union was his old friend Ipatii Potii, whom Ostrozky had persuaded to abandon a political career in order to become a bishop, with the goal of reforming the church. Ostrozky told Potii that he was for the union but only with the consent of the patriarch of Constantinople. Potii, who knew that such consent was not forthcoming, opted for union without Constantinople. Potii’s fellow traveler on the road to Rome was Bishop Kyryl Terletsky, who was not only the exarch, or personal representative, of the patriarch of Constantinople, charged with defending patriarchal interests in the region, but also the bishop of the Volhynia eparchy—Ostrozky’s stronghold.

  Appalled, the old prince had dispatched armed servants to intercept the two bishops on their way to Rome, but they escaped unharmed. Now Ostrozky headed for Brest to take part in the church council with a small army of supporters consisting of Orthodox nobles and servants. He also had support from his Protestant allies—the Lithuanian aristocrats. One of them offered his own home as the venue for the church council, as the king had ordered the town’s Orthodox churches closed. The king’s representatives arrived in Brest with their own armed retinues. In this charged atmosphere, the pending union of churches might well descend into not just disunion but bloody battle.

  The single event known in historiography as the Council of Brest never actually took place, for it split into two gatherings, Catholic and Orthodox. The Catholic council, which featured among its participants the Orthodox metropolitan and most of the bishops, proclaimed the union. The Orthodox council, with a representative of the patriarch of Constantinople presiding, included among its participants two Orthodox bishops as well as scores of archimandrites and representatives of the parish clergy. It refused to join the union and swore continuing allegiance to the patriarch of Constantinople. The Kyiv metropolitanate was now divided, with part of it declaring loyalty to Rome. The schism within the metropolitanate had a clear geographic dimension: Galicia, with Lviv and Peremyshl, remained Orthodox, while Volhynia and the Belarusian eparchies supported the new Uniate Church. The situation on the ground was in fact much more complex than this general description suggests, with religious loyalties sometimes splitting families, while individual parishes and monasteries switched allegiance more than once.

  Despite strong opposition to the Union of Brest, the king held fast to it. He recognized only one council of Brest—the one that had proclaimed the union—and, henceforth, acknowledged the Uniate Church as the sole legitimate Eastern Christian church in his country. Two bishops, scores of monasteries, thousands of churches, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Orthodox faithful were now considered lawbreakers. The Orthodox nobility took the fight to the local and Commonwealth Diets, claiming that the royal authorities were mounting an assault on the freedom of religion guaranteed to the nobility. Indeed they were. Back in the 1570s, immediately after the death of Sigismund Augustus, the Protestant nobles had made freedom of religion a central tenet of the “articles” to which every elected king of Poland had to swear allegiance.

  Now the Protestant nobles backed their Orthodox counterparts, helping to turn the Diets into religious battlegrounds and raising the need for the “accommodation of the Rus’ nation of the Greek rite” at every Commonwealth Diet. But no substantial change took place before the death of King Sigismund III in 1632. For more than thirty years, the Orthodox Church existed without official status or recognition.
As new bishops could not be appointed without royal assent, the Uniates hoped to leave the Orthodox Church without bishops after those who refused to accept the union died out. The Orthodox Church survived only by disobeying the king and the royal authorities. Instead of strengthening royal power, the Union of Brest undermined it. Like the Union of Lublin before it, the church union produced results contrary to the expectations of its authors.

  Not limited to the Diets, the struggle for and against the union spilled into a much broader public arena through publications. In Ukraine and Belarus, there was an explosion of treatises, protestations, attacks, and counterattacks known today under the general rubric of “polemical literature.” Initially, both sides were ill equipped to conduct serious religious polemics and were served by their Polish supporters. Piotr Skarga, a Jesuit who had attended the council of Brest, was among those who used his pen in support of the union. Ostrozky employed the talents of one of his Protestant clients to fight back. From then on, Protestants would write under pen names, usually Greek ones, so as to stress their Orthodox credentials and the authority of their texts. Consequently, they wrote most of the earlier tracts in Polish, which they continued to use even in the later period, when local authors began to write in Ruthenian.

  As time passed, both Uniates and Orthodox began to employ authors from their own milieu who could engage the other side on issues of religious policy, church history, and theology. Among the Orthodox, an author who gained special prominence was Meletii Smotrytsky, the son of one of the editors of the Ostrih Bible, Herasym Smotrytsky. A man of many talents, Meletii was also author of the first grammar of Church Slavonic, which became a standard reference on the subject for the next two centuries. Judging by the number of publications, the Orthodox were more active than the Uniates, perhaps because they lacked other channels for defending their cause as well as the support of the courts.

  The Union of Brest and the rise of Cossackdom led to a southward and eastward shift of Ukraine’s two main cultural frontiers, Christian-Muslim and East-West Christian. That shift brought about a number of major changes in the economic, social, and cultural life of Ukraine. One of the most emblematic of them was the return of the city of Kyiv to the center of Ukrainian history for the first time since the Mongol invasion of the mid-thirteenth century. In the first half of the seventeenth century, that ancient city would become the center of the Orthodox Reformation—an effort on the part of Orthodox churches from Constantinople to Moscow to catch up with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe and reform themselves in the process.

  The revival of Kyiv as a religious and cultural center began in the early seventeenth century as the old city became a safe haven for Orthodox intellectuals from Galicia. They found conditions there more favorable for their religious and educational work than in western Ukraine, where Warsaw put increasing pressure on the Orthodox to join the union with Rome. The key to turning Kyiv into an Orthodox center was continuing Orthodox control (despite the Union of Brest) over the Kyivan Cave Monastery—by far the richest monastic institution in Ukraine and Belarus. In 1615 the archimandrite of the monastery, Yelisei Pletenetsky, moved the printing press once managed by the Orthodox bishop of Lviv to Kyiv. From Lviv and Galicia came not only the press but also writers, proofreaders, and printers who created a new intellectual center under Pletenetsky’s guidance and protection. In the same year, an Orthodox brotherhood was founded in Kyiv and opened a school of its own, as the Lviv brotherhood had done. The school would later develop into a Western-style college, while the printing house would publish eleven books before Pletenetsky’s death in 1624. By that time, Kyiv had replaced Ostrih and Vilnius as the headquarters of Orthodox publishing activity.

  Since the late sixteenth century, the region south of Kyiv had become a Cossack freehold in all but name, a fact that assisted the rise of Kyiv as the focus of religious, educational, and cultural activities opposed to Polish Catholic authority. The Cossacks contributed to the Kyivan renaissance in two major ways. First, their presence minimized the Tatar threat, making the city much more secure as a place for religious dissidents to live and work, as well as for the monks and peasants who tilled the Cave Monastery’s lands to produce the revenue needed to fund publishing and education. Second, when the Kyivan monks found themselves under growing pressure from the Polish government in Warsaw, the Cossacks provided the Orthodox refugees from Galicia with the protection they needed. In 1610, their hetman promised in writing to kill a representative of the Uniate metropolitan sent to Kyiv to convert the local Orthodox. Eight years later, the Cossacks acted on his threat and drowned the man in the Dnieper. “What other nations strive to win by means of words and discourses, the Cossacks accomplish with actions themselves,” wrote the Orthodox intellectual Meletii Smotrytsky, who was for some time an apologist for the Cossacks.

  The Cossacks played a crucial role in consecrating a new Orthodox hierarchy—an all-important act that saved the church from extinction. Left without bishops because of the king’s refusal to allow any new consecrations, the church was thus bound to disappear. In the fall of 1620, Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, by far the best-known and most respected Cossack leader of the time, convinced Patriarch Theophanes of Jerusalem, who was then traveling through Ukraine, to consecrate a new hierarchy. The consecration not only gave new life to the Orthodox metropolitanate but also reestablished Kyiv as an ecclesiastical capital. It happened almost by default. The king did not recognize the new metropolitan, Yov Boretsky, and issued an order for his arrest and the detention of the rest of the new hierarchy. That made it impossible for Boretsky to live in Navahrudak, a town near Vilnius that had served as the residence of the Orthodox metropolitans since the fourteenth century. He had no choice but to reside in Kyiv, the hub of the Cossack-controlled Dnieper region. The Orthodox Church now had its own army in the Cossacks, while the Cossacks gained Orthodox ideologues and a printing press to promote their social and political agenda.

  The Cossack-Orthodox alliance became especially worrisome for Warsaw in the fall of 1632, when the Muscovite army crossed the commonwealth border in an attempt to recapture Smolensk and other territory lost during the Time of Troubles. The commonwealth was caught unprepared, with few troops to defend its borders, almost as in 1620, when Sahaidachny had saved the country at the Battle of Khotyn. To make things worse, the commonwealth was preoccupied with the lengthy election of a new king, as Sigismund III had died in the spring of that year. The death of the king who had helped engineer the Union of Brest presented the commonwealth elites with both a problem and an opportunity to find new ways of dealing with the religious crisis. Instead of assuaging religious differences, the union had divided Rus’ society and turned a good part of it against the government.

  The made-in-Warsaw solution to the problem was called the Accommodation of the Ruthenian Nation of Greek Worship. The Orthodox Church would receive recognition as a legal entity with rights and privileges equal to those of the Uniate Church. The deal, negotiated at the Commonwealth Diet with representatives of the Orthodox nobility and backed by the future king, Władysław IV, achieved certain political goals. In the short run, it bought Orthodox loyalty to the commonwealth and ensured Cossack participation in the Smolensk War on the side of the commonwealth forces. Recognition of the church by the royal authorities also drove a wedge between the Orthodox hierarchy and the Cossacks. The church no longer needed Cossack protection to survive and henceforth oriented itself toward Warsaw.

  As the sponsors of the deal saw it, the rapprochement of the Orthodox Church with the royal authorities called for new ecclesiastical leadership. To strengthen the hand of the “peace with Warsaw” party, the Orthodox participants in the Diet elected a new metropolitan, Peter Mohyla. On entering Kyiv, Mohyla arrested his predecessor, putting him in a cellar at the Kyivan Cave Monastery. A former officer of the Polish army and archimandrite of the Cave Monastery, the new Orthodox leader knew what he was doing. As one who had bee
n close to Smotrytsky and Boretsky, Mohyla had little use for the Cossacks or their protégés in the church. He also had the full support of the royal authorities—he was, after all, the scion of a ruling family.

  Peter Mohyla was not of royal blood, but as a son of the Orthodox ruler (hospodar) of the principality of Moldavia, he was certainly a member of the commonwealth aristocracy. Mohyla’s panegyrists celebrated him as the new leader of Rus’. He took the place of princes such as Ostrozky and of Cossacks such as Sahaidachny, whom Orthodox intellectuals had glorified as heirs and continuators of the Kyivan princes Volodymyr the Great and Yaroslav the Wise. “Do you recall how famous Rus’ was before, how many patrons it had,” wrote one of the panegyrists, speaking “on behalf” of the St. Sophia Cathedral, the architectural legacy of Prince Yaroslav, now reconstructed by Mohyla. “Now there are few of them; Rus’ wants to have you.”

  Mohyla took the task of restoring Rus’-era churches with utmost seriousness, rebuilding quite a few of them. “Restoration” in the mid-seventeenth century, however, meant something quite different than it does today. As the exterior of the St. Sophia Cathedral shows even now, Mohyla and his architects never tried to go back to the original Byzantine models. The new style in which they “restored” their churches came from the West and was influenced by the European baroque. The St. Sophia Cathedral as we know it today is a perfect example of the mixture of cultural styles and trends that defined the essence of Mohyla’s activities as metropolitan. Although Byzantine frescos embellish its interior, the cathedral has the exterior of a baroque church.